Tag: prison

Who is Incarcerated? – Prison Industrial Complex

Going to school with different types of people, I have been exposed to different lifestyles and many different opportunities. With race being a descriptive difference between the environments I have grown up in and learned from, I am aware of the different conditions within these environments. There is a complex racial dynamic in our society …

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Stop the School to Prison Pipeline

Have you ever heard of the school to prison pipeline? It’s likely you haven’t. Because it’s not something that receives a lot of publicity outside of the areas it affects. But it should. Which is why I decided to write this article today. I want to shine some light on something I believe is a …

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Protecting the Mentally Ill in Prison

Imagine you’ve just been sentenced to prison. For a month, a year, 10 years, it doesn’t matter. What do you think would be going through your head? What the conditions will be like? Will you be safe from other inmates? How will you handle being confined? Can you survive without your friends and family on …

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Discrimination Keeping Women in Prison Longer

One of the biggest stories of 2012 was the War on Women. Women weren’t getting treated as equals as they should have been, we were not getting the protections we deserved, and our issues were getting pushed aside. As you probably know, this had been happening for years; however, conservative groups were pushing for even …

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What’s the REAL Status of the Prison System?

Have you noticed any news recently about America’s prison system? Maybe you haven’t, but I have. And what I’ve seen is incredibly contradictory. On one hand you have politicians touting the reforms they’ve made by raising the minimum juvenile age or increasing the number of prison alternatives. But on the other, we see massive overcrowding …

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Prisons: United States vs. European Union

I’ve written a lot of articles over the past few months surrounding the US prison system. The problems I see. How they came about. Changes I think we should make. But I’ve never discussed prison systems outside the United States. And I’ve never actually described what an alternative prison system could look like. But just …

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What is the Purpose of Imprisonment?

Over the last month and a half I’ve written a lot about prison reform and the changes that I think are necessary to fix our system. But it occurred to me today that before we can implement any truly sustainable fixes there needs to be an attitudinal shift regarding the purpose of imprisonment. Right now …

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What about the Women? -The Issue of Female Prisoners

When most people think about incarceration, they typically imagine a place filled with men in orange jumpsuits. Though this does represent a large portion of the prison population, it ignores the fastest growing population: women, which has increased by 757% since 1977. With statistics like this you would think that women in the penal system …

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Economic Argument on Prison Population: A Quick Fix?

Jails, prisons, and criminals used to be taboo topics associated with the worst of the worst of the population, but now with the sheer volume of people sent prison, mass incarceration is an issue that people can no longer ignore. It has finally become a topic of conversation nationwide and a problem that politicians and …

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Linking the War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration

America’s effort to end drug trafficking and drug use with its War on Drugs has had a profound impact on the nation and our neighbors for the last 40 years. It has strained our relationship with many Latin American countries and put undue stress on their local populations, while hurting our people unnecessarily at the …

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